Berlin – Corruption in Germany is considered a serious crime, and law-enforcement agencies treat it with all due gravity. There are several agencies that battle corruption independently of each other: the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the police, the Prosecutor’s Office, the courts in each of the country’s 16 federal lands and Berlin, which is a separate entity.
Stefan Pitsch, the head of the anti-corruption department at Berlin’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, told Ukrainian journalists that in partnership with the Prosecutor’s Office German law enforcement agencies can prosecute cases against both ordinary officials and ministers’ deputies. Up to 100,000 people employed in administrative bodies are potential clients of his department, he said.
Pitsch explained that the German police have less authority to prosecute offenders than their counterparts in Eastern Europe. This is due to the fact that each specific case is ultimately handled by the Prosecutor’s Office, which determines the course of the proceedings. However, with a mere 300 prosecutors in Berlin and 500,000 new cases per year, Berlin police get a significant share of investigations. There are approximate 200 new cases of corruption every year, and they often involve other offences, such as theft, conspiracy, or violation of official secrecy.
German criminal law distinguishes six types of corruption. Simple corruption is defined as offering a preference and accepting it. In other words, one party gives while the other accepts. Apart from preferential treatment, this type of corruption does not involve any other offences. According to Pitsch, legislators formulated this particular regulation in order to nip this type of corruption in the bud, because free tickets to a concert or an invitation to a restaurant may lead to more serious crimes.
Michael Ulbert, the chief commissioner for criminal investigations at Berlin’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, offered a specific example of this type of corruption. Police recently exposed a fraudulent scheme to issue driver’s licenses. The authority to issue driver’s licenses rests with two services whose employees have the status of officials. The owners of various driving schools started giving the staff of the supervision service gifts in the form of fruit baskets without requesting anything in return. Then they began giving instructors money so that they could make these purchases themselves. In return, the owners demanded that the students from their schools receive special treatment from instructors, who would refrain from checking learners’ knowledge. At least 1,000 people received driver’s licenses without any knowledge of traffic rules.
An anonymous call helped solve this case, and Ulbert admitted that the majority of corruption cases are opened on the basis of anonymous testimonies. The policemen did their job by secretly recording a driving instructor, who was providing a student with the correct answer to a question. This instructor was sentenced to three years in prison, and all the bribes in his apartment were confiscated. After serving a prison sentence, a person convicted of corruption usually does not end up with any property, while officials are stripped of their very large pensions and other benefits.
Other types of corruption include disclosure of a state secret, transfer of information, and cases where private companies bribe state officials to secure large contracts from the state. Ulbert believes that corruption can infiltrate any sphere, including private businesses. For example, competition is often distorted when a company’s merchandise is placed in a conspicuous place in a store following an agreement, i.e., in exchange for a certain privilege.
Pitsch told journalists that he does not have any information on cases of corruption in the police force: “It does not make any sense to bribe anyone in our agency because the prosecutor is the decisive body in the sphere of criminal cases, and court cases are opened by the courts,” he said. There is also no corruption among teachers because they receive an adequate salary and nearly all of them are state officials. If they are convicted of corruption, they will lose their generous pensions. According to the law, if officials are sentenced to one year in prison, they lose their status and their entire retirement package.
Pitsch added that Germany pays a great deal of attention to preventing corruption. All state agencies produce atlases of corruption threats, determining which structures may become targets of corruption. Furthermore, each agency has an anti-corruption supervisory body that performs internal checks, and its working group for preventing corruption in the administration has access to the Senate and the government of the respective federal land.
Anti-corruption efforts are thus coordinated, and a concept for preventing corruption is elaborated. Pitsch explained that the heart of this concept is the need to upgrade the staff’s anti-corruption expertise, which is aimed at ensuring uniform treatment of this phenomenon.
“Preventive work in this area is more important than prosecuting offenders. But we won’t be left without work,” said Germany’s anti-corruption head.
Pitsch says that in order to combat corruption, Ukraine needs to ensure that employees earn sufficiently high salaries in order to reduce their inclination to engage in corrupt activities. It is also important to have all population groups involved in the fight against corruption.
